Archives for June 2007

We have around 4,000 affiliates in our system, and about five of the affiliates are doing PPC. My boss now wants me to tell them to stop on our brand names. Can we have them cap their bids so they don’t appear higher than the 2nd or 3rd spot? Is this practice considered fair to our affiliates or will it result in a shortfall of numbers?

A: There are a lot of ways that companies approach this issue. Generally the bigger brands do not allow affiliates to bid on the brand names, and they only permit affiliates to bid on generic terms.

Some other affiliate programs grant special consideration to a select group of affiliates to bid on the trademarked terms, and then there are affiliate programs that have a free for all when it comes to bidding on trademarks.

In my opinion, if you have a big brand you should not permit affiliates to bid on trademarked terms. This is something the merchant can easily do themselves, and affiliates that solely bid on trademarks are not bringing any value to the table.

That said, it’s fairly common for some of the bigger ppc affiliates to get permission to bid on trademarks, because they’re bidding on a large volume of words for the merchant.

The reasoning here is that the affiliate is taking a risk and loss on some of those words and the trademarks balance out some of that risk.

I was just reading over at The Next Net about how video search engine Blinkx is putting the final touches on a new advertising platform for Web video code-named Project Trilby.

When it launches next Monday it will be called blinkx AdHoc. It will offer media companies and video sites a way to place targeted ads alongside (or even in) Web videos based on the specific words spoken in the videos, as well as their overall context.

Web video advertising is the fastest-growing segment online, yet nobody really knows how to make those ads as relevant as search ads.

Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake says:

“You need something akin to AdSense for video, which is what we have built.”

This all sounds very interesting, but the pat about it being “AdSense for video” strikes me as a little odd. I mean, it’s one thing if a third party anoints it with such a moniker, but when the CEO says it about his own release?

I was out sick for this show (it was taped last week, since Lisa Picarille and myself were at LinkShare Symposium yesterday), and Sam Harrelson filled in for me.

Sam and Lisa welcomed blogging and video maverick, Jim Kukral.

Topics discussed included affiliates using video to get noticed, Jim and his video experience with RackSpace, how affiliates can get started with video, how to blog in an entertaining way, and bringing the fun back to online marketing.

The LinkShare Symposium 2007 took place on June 20 at Chelsea Piers. It was a packed day of networking and information.

The day kicked off with a keynote from Don Tapscott, Chief Executive of New Paradigm and best-selling author of Wikinomics. Don had some really interesting things to say – one of the best keynotes I’ve seen.

I attended some interesting sessions, as well, including Partnerships 2.0, where the panelists discussed the integration of emerging technologies and affiliate marketing.

One of the panelists was from a company called VideoClix, and he shared some demos on their dynamic, clickable video solution.

This is chapter 6, Getting the Word Out, of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.

I’ve got a handful of steps on how to promote your affiliate program, to get some awareness of the affiliate program and recruit for it.

The first step is that you’ve got to craft your message to sell your affiliate program. Put that message into the language of affiliates. Don’t just say you’ve got a great affiliate program that will earn fortunes for affiliates. Be honest when promoting your affiliate program.

Provide affiliates with hard numbers they can consider when looking at your affiliate program. Tell the affiliates your average order size, overall EPC, and any other relevant metrics that can help them determine the potential of your affiliate program for them.

Affiliates don’t fall for those proclamations that you offer the best affiliate program in the world. Give them some credit and sell the real attributes of your program.

The second step is building your list. For some reason, a lot of affiliate managers seem to think it’s acceptable to collect a bunch of e-mail addresses and Spam them about joining affiliate programs. It’s not.

Instead, develop a contact list of prospective affiliates. There are lots of methods for doing this. Personally, I use a program called Link Capture, which enables me to run queries on the various search engines for keywords to see which sites are ranking well.

It also enables me to see which sites are linking to other sites, and that can be helpful sometimes to determine who some of the affiliates are for your competition.

The results from queries on Link Capture can be exported. This includes the WHOIS information for the domain and other useful pieces of data. When you’ve gathered this contact information, I’d recommend phoning or snail mailing the prospective affiliates.

I’ve sent out lots of direct mail over time, including postcards that tout the attributes of affiliate programs, as well as hand-written notes to the target affiliates. Follow up with a phone call.

While it’s tempting to mass market your affiliate program, it’s far more effective to have the personal touch. In the end, you’ll begin some real relationships with qualified affiliates, rather than a bunch of random strangers in your affiliate program.

The third step is to look into affiliate directories. Now this is listed in my book, because directories were a useful resource back in 2000 when i wrote it. Even though I have an affiliate directory myself at AffiliateThing.com, the affiliate directory is something of an antiquated approach for recruiting affiliates.

Affiliates just aren’t using the directories much anymore. You should definitely not use one of those submission services to submit your affiliate program to the “top 50 affiliate directories” or whatever. It’s a joke that there are even 50 affiliate directories of any value.

The fourth step is affiliate recruiting, and it takes a lot of different forms. Visibility is a great advertisement for your affiliate program. Work on building a good reputation and that will help to sell the affiliate program. Affiliates will find the top affiliate programs.

They don’t necessarily want to be found by you. Affiliates will hear about your program in forums and blogs and by word of mouth. So you can be pretty successful by being a passive recruiter and putting some focus on branding your affiliate program and yourself.

The fifth and final step is to do some PR and advertising. Sponsor the places where affiliates are going, such as blogs and forums. Targeted newsletters are a good place to advertise your affiliate program, too. One of my favorite places to advertise is on the pay per click search engines.

And conference sponsorships can have a big impact for you. That provides a chance to get in front of hundreds of the bigger affiliates.

One thing you shouldn’t do is to issue a press release that simply announces that your affiliate program exists. So what? Where’s the story there?

If you’re going to put out a press release, and you should, have a story to tell. Don’t tell how you have this great affiliate program that is paying 7% commission – that’s so bland and it won’t get picked up by anybody. Have a story behind your press release and make it interesting.

Also, realize that recruiting is an ongoing effort. It’s not something you just do for a couple months and then magically get quality affiliates organically after you’ve pulled back your recruiting.

Always think about new ways you can get the word out about your affiliate program, and make it a point to tweak and improve your affiliate program all the time.

The keynote speaker for Monday, July 9 will be humorist Ze Frank. On Tuesday, July 10, the keynote will be a discussion featuring Rob Kniaz, Product Manager at Google, and Mark Papia, VP of Performance Marketing at FOX Interactive Media.

Affiliate Summit is taking place at the Intercontinental in Miami, but the hotel is sold out. If you would like to be placed on the wait list for the Intercontinental, please email us your name, arrival date and departure date to realdeal@affiliatesummit.com.